You’re Not Stupid: How to Easily Learn Difficult Things

imagine what would happen if you suddenly decided to become a doctor spend the next seven to eight years having to absorb endless information on human anatomy physiology pharmacology behavior communication alongside skills and applications all into your brain that's what i decided to do and between sometimes shitty lectures council teaching and worldwide global events a lot of this learning has not actually happened in the lecture theater or in hospital but it has had to be self-taught so as any other medical student i have spent a significant proportion of my 20s just learning and the single most

life-changing skill i have taught myself is how to teach myself so today i thought i would completely break down and show you the step-by-step process that i use to teach myself especially very difficult topics to learn in a way that makes them digestible memorable and above all applicable and interesting this will be a combination of my own personal experience tips that i've gained from reading the books of the most excellent teachers in the world and also a bunch of evidence-based research around the human memory brain and learning let's get straight into it there was this

general consensus that neurology is a very difficult topic to study so for the purpose of this video i'm going to break down how i would study one topic in neurology which is multiple sclerosis so i have a six step process of which the very first step is called broadening the context and what i will be doing here is placing this topic in a broader context in the world and in my brain for it to make sense because at the moment multiple sclerosis is just a chapter in a textbook or some questions in my exam i

don't particularly care about this there's many chapters in many textbooks there's no inherent curiosity in me to go oh my god i must know what this is about and before you say well you spend a lot of money in university and if you don't study properly then you're not going to pass your exams this is not enough incentive for me to actually study things properly or care about the things that i study so i need to place this in a broader context in order for it to make more sense and excite me a bit more

words in a textbook not exciting real life world much more exciting richard feyman one of the best teachers in the world identified this phenomenon when he said i have to understand the world you see so he felt very very strongly that people have an inherent curiosity about how things in the world work and this is what i try to leverage before i study anything that is difficult i need to put my curiosity about this topic and my emotional investment in this topic at the maximum level it can reach and at the moment it's just non-existent

multiple sclerosis couldn't care less so let's make it very interesting for elizabeth now the way that i will do this is that i will go to google and i will google multiple sclerosis and i will go to the news tab but what i'm looking here is for some sort of media case this is not going to be the studies of new drugs being found because again i'm just not interested in this enough at the moment this will be is there some celebrity who has it is there someone who died because of it is there some

huge controversy around this because i know that my brain is much more likely to kind of attach to these interesting things than it's to attach to a list of molecules which i don't kind of recognize at the moment so still there's no textbook here i'm just on google and i am searching for um something related to multiple sclerosis and what i found this is going to work perfectly so this is a guardian piece on selma blair discussing her history with muscle scarces ideal absolutely ideal i don't know who this lady is but she looks like

she's famous so this is a famous person that i can identify the disease with and what i'm going to do at this stage is that i am going to kind of read this and place it in my mind if i just read about multiple sclerosis in a book there's nothing that can connect it to pre-existing things in my mind because there's no slot for multiple sclerosis in my mind at the moment there's something around neurology and yes i can identify facts here and there but if i'm just treating every single chapter as just random facts

they're all going to kind of disconnect at some point and not make any sense so what i'm leveraging instead of my random science fact is i'm leveraging my curiosity and my understanding of the world in a much more layman sort of way in a way that anyone would understand and if this is written on the guardian i'm absolutely sure that everyone will understand while i'm reading this i'm going to be picking out things that stand out to me that i know that i can anchor to now what anchoring is is connecting things from my pre-existing

strong memory to things that are specific to multiple sclerosis and i want this connection to be as strong as possible so therefore this context is really really strong so let's have a look she's describing her childhood i'm going to be picturing her every time that i read these things so it says that she's suffered from multiple symptoms that come and go okay so this is very interesting there's a bit here about her going to florida on a holiday and this is interesting because it's florida specifically which is really warm i can remember that and then

she was a trip for instagram so paid influencer thing she bought a tiny bikini and an hermes shoes okay very fancy so they're on a yacht again really strong imagery here going on in my mind and what happened here was unfortunately when she was on the water she couldn't move okay so she jumped into off the yacht and then she was kind of paralyzed she thought she was paralyzed she couldn't control her limbs she couldn't swim in the water okay this is a very strong visual experience for me someone in kind of a tiny bikini

and in hermes uh shoes jumping off a boat she probably didn't have the shoes on but in my mind um jumping off the boat into the sea cannot move okay this is very strong imagery good so then we move on so what happens is that yep she had a romberg's test okay um she ordered an mri on the spot she talks a lot about how no one had ordered her mris in the past okay oh again very very good there's a part where she speaks about using a cane at a celebrity event which again something

quite rare that we don't get to see she was crying quite a lot unfortunately i'll bless her interesting there are times when okay so there's times when both she pees the dog pees in the house and she pees herself because she can't she probably has some urinary incontinence here okay interesting there's a lot of visual stuff here so there's a lot of information here related to multiple sclerosis which is probably quite similar to the list of symptoms i would be getting in a textbook but in this case they are being anchored to so many things

in my brain so i'm thinking yachts i'm thinking summer blair i'm thinking canes i'm thinking dogs i'm thinking um peeing one's trousers i'm thinking um not be sometimes dancing sometimes not being able to move so there's all of these things i'm building a very strong picture in my mind and i'm anchoring it specifically to this individual so thank her so much for writing this article and i think there's a book on this somewhere so um this has mean that i've put this neurological condition into context now i'm going to be focusing on step number two

which has to do with emotional implications and what this means is that if there is a very very challenging topic i need to make sure that i am fully emotionally primed to tackle this and what this means is that i need to understand the consequences of not learning it and understand the benefits of learning it and also try to convince myself or try to frame it in a way that i am genuinely itching to do this this is the dopamine section of this um study method dopamine is a neurotransmitter which is related to our anticipation

of something when we are anticipating something exciting dopamine increases in our brain and we really really want to do this thing so this is what i'm trying to do with these sort of topics so at the moment yes i'm slightly interested in her story but again there's many stories out there why would i specifically want to learn about multiple sclerosis so because we know that the scarcest interest is desire we want to go for the desire angle here so i'm going to go back to the article and see what is something interesting here what is

something about future me that might be interested is there something that particularly might make me kind of compelled to learn more so okay i think the part that stands out to me the most was that she's been misdiagnosed her whole life in turn especially there's this segment when she said when she got diagnosed she said she felt an adrenaline rush of emotion it felt like giving birth the release of it and i've gone through this myself when you get a diagnosis for something that you've had your whole life and you suddenly understand what that thing

is it can be so so so absolutely relieving and life-changing and it's such a bittersweet but mostly sweet moment and i can't really relate to her with this thing and so i don't have multiple sclerosis but i can see how she must have felt in some ways in some capacity with her experience so now i'm emotionally invested now i know that this is one of those conditions that sometimes gets missed that sometimes is misdiagnosed that apparently some very few tests could have found so for her it was a positive romberg's test and an mri so

now i'm kind of frustrated and emotionally invested yes i need to understand what the hell is happening here and why this is so important i hope you can see at this point how i have a very very vague clue about what this condition is but i'm already much more likely to remember details about it and also i'm much more likely to be emotionally invested in this topic a huge neurology topic which is just another chapter in my book i could not have cared less about now i'm like hell yes this is absolutely awful let's learn

about it let's study more so now i get into part three of my studying which is the deep dive and this is potentially the most controversial bits because the way that i study difficult things is by narrowing down on one specific thing that i need to know about them and then learning only about that and asking questions around it as and when they pop up so let me try to explain this specifically i don't do overviews because i find overviews tiring um even if i'm excited about something they make me bored about if i just

read a whole chapter or a whole essay on ms i couldn't care less i will get bored halfway and i will stop doing this but if it's one very specific problem i'm trying to solve i can get super super invested in like sitting down for 11 hours and going how the hell do i do this because i don't understand it so i'm leveraging my very intense curiosity rather than my vague boring textbook understanding so what i do at this stage is i think okay from all of these things that i've read about ms what's one

thing that just stood out to me a lot and what stood out to me was kind of her saying specifically that oh i always have another pair of pants and sometimes i will urinate in my pants and my dog will urinate in the house because so clearly there's some kind of um urinary incontinence associated with this condition which is quite a curiosity so i'm going to jump into the urinary incontinence and what i'll do from this day so i still know nothing about ms i don't know i know it's something to do with nerves and

the brain because it's neurology i don't know how it works so what i'm going to be doing at this stage is i'm just going to kind of google signs and symptoms of ms and see and then search this page for urinary incontinence just on wikipedia i'll do that okay so urinary incontinence is mentioned there it doesn't actually say where it's from so okay i'm going to go now to um another page on bladder incontinence again it doesn't have a lot it seems to be a nerve thing and i'm thinking okay why would the nerves get

damaged and how are the nerves damaged so she has bladder incontinence because the nerves are damaged how are the nerves damaged now i'm curious about how nerves work and what's the issue in ms specifically so this is where i've reached my limits with all this like general knowledge um searches and this is where i'm going to start going into some very specific things to learn and this is for medicine strongly recommend the ncbi this is where i study most of my things i don't actually use a lot of textbooks but people will write like long

thesis summaries on different different conditions so i'm just going to go on to this condition for um myelination because i figure out i found out that it has to do with myelination okay so i read about myelin interesting what can happen when my lining goes wrong this kind of gives me an idea of what was happening with her but then i go with urinary incontinence is that peripheral or central first i think okay it might be peripheral have a look no it's not peripheral it's central so i'm like what the hell this makes no sense

then i'll go into deep diving things again and again so what i'm doing here is jumping a lot i go urinary incontinence why is that oh it's because of nerves oh okay what's wrong with the nerves they're demyelinated what is myelin oh okay is it peripherals or central nerves no it's only central noise what the hell why is that the case so i keep on jumping back and forth from one topic to another topic to another topic to another topic all within multiple sclerosis but the key and essential thing is that these are all logical

jumps that i am personally making this is how i am teaching myself i'm asking every question and i'm then finding the answers for those things which will then raise other questions and then i'll go answer those and this will take me from a woman peeing herself with her dog to me understanding the medical management of multiple sclerosis eventually but this whole jump journey will be very personal to elizabeth where my interests take me what i'm curious about what i already know what i need to search and google this is all dependent on me so i'm

self-teaching myself by using my emotional investment and my curiosity continuously throughout this process and this genuinely tends to be so much more fun and also so much more in depth in things than it would be just reading this chapter summary somewhere now i did say that this was slightly controversial and this curiosity jumping is based on many studies which say that you are much more likely to stick to a task long term if you are leaving it when you're not finding it interesting and jumping to another aspect of it and this is what luqman and

becker identified when they said when i am stuck for one moment i leave it and do something else with this method i can work on different things simultaneously i never encounter any mental blockages and this is what is super crucial with self-teaching i think you need to have a strong curiosity about the topic as a whole and then kind of flick from one thing that you find interesting to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing you will come back to the thing that you suddenly left when it becomes relevant in another

point so rather than forcing yourself to just take in all this information without it sticking anywhere you can go to it as and when it becomes relevant and interesting going back to fame this act of what i consider almost playing around with the topic that i am learning is what he clearly identified when he was teaching himself and when he was teaching other people he said physics discussed me a little bit now but i used to enjoy doing physics why did i enjoy it i used to play with it i used to do whatever i

felt like doing so this is super key for me to i only study what i feel like studying even though i'm technically forced to learn the topic there's so much more freedom inside it i can work with rather than what has been given or summarized by someone else now we get to point number four which is questions or projects now this depends on the sort of topic that you are learning if you are learning a more mathematical topic or a more physics topic then i would potentially recommend going for kind of building a project with

this or answering questions with it specifically but if you're learning more of a medical topic i would recommend going for answering questions on the thing itself so even though i only have kind of an in-depth very patchy understanding of ms which is mostly driven by my curiosity and by the things that i've read before and it's not this like structured thing i still don't want to go for the structure what i'm going to do is actually try to approach questions with it because at this point i've already been primed with a lot of things that

i think are relevant but now i want to see what the actual medics think is relevant and what will come up in my exam so i'm going to find clinical case studies or i'm going to find clinical questions that are related to this condition and i'm going to try and answer them knowing that i'm going to be very bad at answering them because one it's the first time and two i don't actually know a lot about this topic yet still but the reason that this is so important is because as i am answering questions i'm

referring back to textbooks and we're referring back to google to answer those questions so the process of learning things and the process of answering questions on this thing becomes interwoven and this has been identified to be a very effective way to study senka avron said that experienced academic readers usually read attacks with questions in mind and try to relate it to other probable approaches while inexperienced regions tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given so it's actually super effective to not have the reading

and the questions as to separate things but to interweave them together against circa ahearns said that ability to use one own understanding is a challenge not a given it should consistently be challenging and it's fine for it to be challenging for you to actually recall things that you've just read or you've just learned the very interesting thing here is because i've done a lot of priming and putting things in context as i'm reading things on this condition i can relate them back to the first case or the first article that i read so for example

there's something in a mess called otoph sign which basically means that the signs and symptoms tend to get worse with heat and this is where i remember oh when she went on this holiday and she was jumping off the yacht so it was really warm that's when her symptoms got worse so again i can relate this sign to the first clinical case that's a connection that's much stronger than just another clinical sign mentioned somewhere this process also serves as priming for other topics other neurological topics other things that i'm just kind of anchoring somewhere in

my brain that i might come up with later as there be some things that are connected to ms and there are some things which will just be dead ends but don't remain there there'll be things in neurology that will be connected to these in the future the next step is step number five which is the brooding stage and this is a combination of familiarity and lack of familiarity with the topic so basically familiarity is good of course because you need to be familiar with something to understand it but familiarity can also be quite dangerous as

bernstein recognized there is a thing called the mirror exposure effect which doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it completely independent of our actual performance we unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill so as i'm doing more questions and as i've been sitting on this for example a few hours i might start to think that oh i grasp this when i really don't because there's a lot of other steps that i need to do so what i do in this case is that i will breed on this and what this

means is that i will recognize that it will take me a lot longer than i think to absorb this huge topic so i'm just going to let it rest let it sit and do some space repetition i'm not going to go into detail on this because so many other people have talked about it already for example some days i'm just going to put it in my calendar so when i wake up in the morning i go oh let's think about a mess and i'll just think about it as i'm doing my makeup for example or

as i'm walking to the tube station or i might kind of remind myself of it before i go to sleep just so some part of my brain kind of tries to refer back to it and see how much i can remember and kind of helps with those retention curves because as time goes our retention or understanding of the topic becomes less and less and less and less and having these little reminders here and there either with questions themselves or either just to prompt me to oh what do you remember about this topic or explain it

or what was the case with selma blair then i will try to kind of recall and make these retention graphs kind of go down a lot less than they usually do so i'm working both with and against familiarity i'm recognizing that it's a bit of a dangerous one but that i also need to do it so i keep both of these things in mind and the last point is creating false deadlines and this is what kahneman identified as academic or non-fiction tests almost always take significantly more time than we expect to learn them and every

time that students and even professors have been asked how long they estimate will take them to finish a text or understand the text they always always underestimate this so i keep this in mind that i will have this fake illusion of knowing what's going on but it will take me a lot longer but i will create some false deadlines in the meantime and say oh i should learn all their maths within the next two hours and then i'm going to repeat all of a mess in three hours in two weeks so i'll create these false

deadlines again and again knowing that i'm probably going to forget most of the things when i get there and that's absolutely fine if you resonated at all with my way of teaching myself something that does this for you automatically is brilliant they use so many of the techniques that i mentioned earlier automatically in teaching you different sort of stem subjects it's absolutely mind-blowing i would really recommend even just trying it out for a short while to see just how different it is to learn when you are basing things on real life examples and questions and

making things interesting rather than the ways of learning and teaching that we are used to in normal life and normal school i'm currently doing the questions on logic but there are some great ones on mathematics and also physics which i have tried in the past and are really entertaining and fun there'll be a link in my description which will give you i think a 20 discount on brilliant that you can check out or just look at it and see if it works for you so yes that was how i teach myself difficult things that i

usually would be too bored or uninterested or definitely struggling with grasping this has been the method that i've developed for these special topics i wish i had the luxury of time to be able to do it for everything that i study because i swear i would know so much more but it's just unfeasible this is only for those rare things that are so challenging or so uninteresting to start with that i need to really really get serious with most of the things are just a combination of passively learning them somehow doing some exercises here and

there and cramming some numbers for an exam so yeah if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye